During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson unloaded on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for exposing himself as a fraud by accepting lavish gifts from a Republican billionaire without reporting them.
According to a bombshell report from ProPublica, Thomas failed to report international travel on private jets and yachts and other gifts, including housing for his elderly mother that was provided to him by GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow.
Robinson said that Thomas’ explanation for his failure to disclose that bounty was a bad joke.
“It’s incredible, and he never reported… a penny of these donations. Then Harlan Crow bought his mother’s house and fixed it up, as far as we can tell, and has let her live there rent-free — we’re not sure about that. They haven’t commented on that, but I take the ‘no comment’ basically as confirmation,” Robinson said.
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“Again, so he expects us to take seriously his reading of the tiniest nuances of the Constitution and give them great weight and he can’t read a simple disclosure form? He can’t see the difference between, you know, hospitality, which may be allowed, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts, including private jet travel — it’s absurd, it’s ridiculous,” he added.
“He’s just laughing at us, and there are no — there are really no rules, certainly no punishments for ethics at the Supreme Court. It’s also outrageous there’s not a code — really there is a code that covers judges in general, and they’ve kind of tried to follow it and are supposed to follow it, they didn’t follow it — so what? What can anybody do to him short of, you know, impeachment and removal. That could happen, but it’s not going to happen. Here we are. Again, the joke is on us,” Robinson concluded.
Watch the segment below from MSNBC.
